Venture capital firms provided much of the early, $93 million-plus financing for Oculus. According to Bloomberg News, which tracks these things closely, three VC firms held slightly more than half of Oculus' shares.

So let's assume the half-dozen members of the initial Oculus team – plus key executives and tech talent brought in later – divided the rest of the shares. Divide $2 billion in half, and then divide one of those halves again among the Oculus team, and it's probable that no new billionaires were created in this deal.

About $1.6 billion of the payout (which is expected to be finalized this spring) is in Facebook stock, which fell in value after the deal was announced. The Oculus staff stands to get another $300 million if it delivers on secret performance milestones.

So $2 billion is a big payday, to be sure, but the Irvine folks need to stay at their jobs and complete the next steps of developing the Rift virtual reality goggles if they want to get even richer.

2. Did Oculus just alienate its biggest supporters?

Thousands of backers of Oculus VR felt like they were punched in the stomach when they heard about the deal.

In 2012, those tech faithful had handed over hundreds of dollars apiece to Palmer Luckey, a teenager who impressed video game executives with his patched-together virtual reality goggles.

The fundraising campaign that Oculus founder Luckey launched on Kickstarter.com was the purest form of faith. These believers offered nothing but support and an idealistic vision of what Oculus could become. They got T-shirts and posters and unofficial membership in a tight-knit community – but no shares of stock – as is typical for crowdfunding campaigns.

So this week early backers felt a bit like rejected parents discovering their offspring doesn't want their version of the future. Oh, and the kid also won the lottery and isn't giving anything to his loving parents.

“I believed in the goals and visions that you had,” a top comment on an Oculus forum online said Tuesday. “Now that you have been acquired by Facebook and no longer retain control over your own company, how can you guarantee that you will continue pursuing these goals?”

It didn't help that the buyer was Facebook, which is reviled by some in the Oculus fan base.

“I don't think we would be seeing nearly the backlash if the buyer was someone else other than Facebook,” said Brian Fargo, CEO of a Newport Beach game developer that has raised more than $6 million on Kickstarter. “The concern of the backers are that they bought into both a product and a future but now fear it will be gutted somehow.”

3) Mark Zuckerberg: empire-building genius or loony?

One billion dollars for a photo app (Instagram)? Nineteen billion for a text messaging app (WhatsApp)? Two billion for a company that hasn't made a consumer product yet (Oculus)?

Time will tell, of course, if Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's acquisition strategy is a wise investment in heading off possible threats to the company's social media empire, or the ill-considered spree of a company with a bloated stock price.

You could compare the Oculus deal to Facebook's acquisition in 2011 of a company that made a new kind of touch-screen book. Nearly three years later, that led to a complete rethink of how the company's mobile app works.

Or it could turn out like two key purchases in 2005 – Google bought Android and Apple bought FingerWorks – that led directly to all the magic we do with our phones today.

Of course, big tech deals also go bust. Google bought Motorola in 2011 for $12.5 billion, only to turn around and sell it this year for less than a quarter of that price.

It took until 2007 for Apple to ship the iPhone and another year after that to make the App Store. So, if history is any guide, we might know whether the Oculus deal was a smart one around, say, 2017.

4) Oculus goggles: science fiction or the next iPhone?

The Rift as it exists today is a mere proof-of-concept, one that has to be worn to truly be believed.

In a demo Oculus shows off called “Titans of Space,” you crane your neck upward and Jupiter towers above you, larger than anything you've ever seen. The scale shifts and Jupiter shrinks to just a small globe floating in front of a sea of yellow stretching as far as you can see in every direction. That's how big the sun is in comparison.

In “Alone in the Rift,” you see a small cabin in the dark woods occupied by a ghost. You may want to escape, but you can't – look at the ground and close your eyes and the sound washing over your ears reminds you where you are. As you are “chased” through the virtual forest and start sweating, you realize you're having a physical reaction that's impossible with other forms of media.

There are questions that still need to be answered about the Rift – such as, what does wearing virtual reality goggles over an extended period do to our perception, eyesight and mind? And can Oculus fully overcome an initial limitation of the first kits that gave some users motion sickness?

Having the deep pockets of Facebook probably increases the likelihood that Oculus will have a chance to answer those questions.

5) Will we really use virtual reality to visit the doctor?

In the Oculus Rift, Zuckerberg sees a “new communication platform” that lets you share not just dog photos and status updates but “entire experiences.”

“Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting on goggles in your home,” Zuckerberg wrote on a Facebook post.

Zuckerberg isn't alone. Jeff Norris, a computer scientist at NASA who has experimented with the Rift, thinks virtual reality will some day let people experience a Mars landing in a much different way than they did with TV and the first moon landing.

Cameras that see in 3D will map the Mars surface landscape and beam it back to Earth. Shortly after, people wearing goggles on Earth could stand in their living rooms and accompany a person in a space suit as they descend a ladder and leave a dusty footprint on the red planet.

Jaron Lanier, a Microsoft researcher who pioneered virtual reality in the 1980s, hopes the technology will finally break out from the confines of labs and into general use.

“I hope lots of people will soon find VR to be as fascinating as I have,” Lanier said in an email exchange about the Oculus investment. “If they don't make a success of this support, that would be a drag. I have seen a lot of cases where big-ticket acquisitions seem to actually slow innovative startups down.”

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